Acceptance of voting technology: between confidence and trust

Social aspects of security of information systems are oftendiscussed in terms of “actual security” and “perceived security”. This maylead to the hypothesis that e-voting is controversial because in papervoting, actual and perceived security coincide, whereas they do not inelectronic systems. In this paper, we argue that the distinction betweenactual and perceived security is problematic from a philosophical perspective,and we develop an alternative approach, based on the notion of trust.We investigate the different meanings of this notion in computer science,and link these to the philosophical work of Luhmann, who distinguishesbetween familiarity, confidence and trust. This analysis yields several usefuldistinctions for discussing trust relations with respect to informationtechnology. We apply our framework to electronic voting, and proposesome hypotheses that can possibly explain the smooth introduction ofelectronic voting machines in the Netherlands in the early nineties.